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23
Sub-Standard Accommodation.
Our five-year programme proceeded steadily on its way and at
the end of the year approximately some 20 properties remained to be
dealt with.
It is evident and true that this district enjoys a high standard of
housing but it is also evident that the increase of modern house development
tends to bring into snarp relief the disparity existing between
extremes of "satisfactory houses." On the one hand you have the
house which in appearance one would practically write off in these
modern days as being unfit for habitation. A different story however
falls to be told when you try to translate the condition of that house
into terms of legal disrepair. On the other hand you have—to quote
an average example—an ordinary Council house with all reasonable
amenities readily to hand.
The time is far removed when any real complacency on the present
housing situation can be justified and the position of a housewife who
has to bring up her young family under circumstances which are legally
satisfactory but nevertheless may include an absence of a really adequate
hot water supply—of a water closet inside the house—of any fixed bath
whether or not in a separate room—of a satisfactory food store and of
adequate lighting, still gives one food for thought. In other words,
the more rapid the pace that is set in modern housing the greater the
gap necessarily created between a modern house and its outmoded
counterpart.
The general impact of housing upon health is very real. On items
of actual detail however our ground may be less secure or less susceptible
to proof. Damp, for example, is the recognised villain of the housing
scene and one can rely upon recourse being had to it when an explanation
is needed for anything from the common cold to much more serious
conditions. I am not personally convinced that mere word association
provides an adequate compensation for what I think in fact is often
lack of precise knowledge of the cause of illness. It seems, however,
likely that in this as in other fields if a statement finds its way into a
sufficiency of books and is sufficiently often repeated, it achieves what
appears to be a form of justification—not to say truth—by repetition.
I consider that it is much more sensible to say that a house should
not be damp and should not be defective on ordinary accepted standards
rather than to attempt to justify an assertion that demonstrable illness
is associated with any particular housing defects.
Housing conditions should in other words produce relative ease of
life rather than merely avoid defects which allegedly produce positive
harm to health.